Museum offers day-long workshop Sept. 25 on reading heiroglyphs

CUYAMACA COLLEGE, Sept. 10 (Press Release) –The Heritage of the Americas Museum, located on the campus of Cuyamaca College in Rancho San Diego, offers a special program including both a hieroglyphs workshop and an extended tour of Egypt where students will practice their new skills, reading the ancient writing they find on museum artifacts, or in temples and tombs. Participants may attend the workshop, the tour, or both.

The one-day workshop, September 25th, 2010, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., will teach participants to read the cartouche names of the pharaohs, their queens, their nobles and their gods. There are magical formulas and curses that few can read or understand. Now you can – while others only stand in awe and wonder what those little pictures mean. Although the study of the ancient language is the work of a lifetime, you will learn enough here to quickly translate many sign groups directly into English. You will recognize sacred inscriptions on artifacts and in tombs and temple walls. Yes, you will write your name in hieroglyphs and read the names of others in the group. The workshop cost is only a $20 donation to the Museum. The workbook, Hieroglyphs for Travelers, is provided free.

The program is directed by Ron Fellows, CM, Associate Director Emeritus of the Museum and a member of the International Association of Egyptologists. Fellows teaches Egyptology programs in the US and in Egypt and frequently leads tours in Egypt that are, in the words of one participant, “the stuff of dreams.”

This special tour of Egypt is scheduled for February 12 – 27, 2011. This small group of travelers will view exquisite art designed to work magic, to guide mortals in the afterlife, and to stir souls with its beauty. From Cairo to Abu Simbel, the group will discover 3,000 years of Egyptian life and death along the Eternal Nile while visiting the magnificent Egyptian Antiquities Museum in Cairo – with the Treasures of Tutankhamon, and the royal mummies. They’ll experience the Great Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, the pyramids at Dahshur and Saqqara, the ancient temples and tombs at Luxor and Thebes, the tomb of Tutankhamon and others in the Valley of the Kings. Oh, yes, they will visit the immense temples at Abu Simbel in Nubia built by Ramesses the Great. This group will also experience those rarely visited sites missed by other groups: the temple at Abydos, with the famous King List and the Osireion, the temple at Dendera, with the astrological ceiling – and the beautiful private tombs at Qurna, Aswan and El Kab. These sites have all been waiting – for thousands of years – for you.

For those who have previously visited this ancient land, it’s time to return – and really experience Egypt. We will drive from Cairo through middle Egypt to Akhenaten (the Horizon of the Aten), the rarely visited site of king Akhenaten’s sacred city, now called Amarna – and to the tomb of the heretic king, Akhenaten himself.

But there’s more — for the complete pictorial itinerary of our 16 day tour or to reserve your place, see our Web site at or call Ron at (619) 463-2955. Register for the hieroglyphs workshop at the Heritage if the Americas Museum, 12110 Cuyamaca College Drive West, El Cajon, (619) 670-5194.